Marathon: Difference between revisions

The game engine itself underwent several changes from its first incarnation. Although most of these changes were "under-the-hood", a few were visible to the user. The ''Marathon 2'' engine offered preformance gains on some machines, in addition to support for higher resolutions, higher color depths, and better quality sound. The enhanced engine also allowed the loading of maps from external files, allowing for users to (later) create and play their own maps.

*The most basic variety is the Fighter, a lightly armored pfhor wielding a shock staff (acting as a projectile weapon as well in the case of the blue and orange types). Fighters come in four flavors, in order of ascending rank and nastiness: Green, Purple, Orange, and Blue.

*Hunters are the Pfhor assault troops. They wear very heavy armor and have shoulder-mounted energy cannons. They come in four flavors: Brown, Green, Purple and Blue.

*The Juggernaut (aka The Big Floaty Thing What Kicks Our Asses) is the Pfhor tank. These flying armored weapons platforms are like a mix of a tank and an attack helicopter, only bigger and badder. They fire dual homing rockets as well as enforcer weapon bursts. They come in two flavors: Bad and Worse (Grey and Brown).

The Pfhor also utilize the 'Conditioned Ranks', or enslaved soldiers, who are forced to fight for the empire. Conquered races make up the majority of the conditioned ranks. However, only the S'pht and Drinniol appear in-game.

Other than the player's character, the human characters in the game are all referred to as "BOBs" (which stands for "Born On Board"). They wear different-colored suits, but all have the same face in-game. In ''Marathon'', most are harmless and generally ignore the player (and occasionally announce "They're everywhere!"); in ''Durandal'' and ''Infinity'' they carry pistols and fight for Durandal with the player. If the player attacks them often enough, they will consider him a traitor and eventually return fire. However, a few, called simulacrums (or "assimilated BOBs"), are actually android bombs; upon seeing the player's character, they will run directly towards him (usually shouting things like "I'm out of ammo!", "Thank God it's you!" or the infamous "Frog blast the vent core!" (see below), and when close enough (according to Durandal, less than 3 metres) they will explode and inflict severe damage to anyone nearby. This is especially a problem on levels where a certain number of BOBs must be protected to succeed. There are other differences between human Bobs and Simulacrums: apparently the assimilated Bobs have red pupils, only two toes, no genitalia and disformed teeth (though these differences do not appear in-game). Also, assimilated Bobs will run directly towards you - whereas humans will run erratically, and assimilated Bobs never shoot at anyone.

The Cyborg's mind and personality, unlike the Chief's, are mostly left up to the player to speculate on. Although Durandal describes him as "a magnificent killing machine" and asks if being allowed to kill more Pfhor will "make you happy", the AI is more likely being malicious than accurate. While the Cyborg does not seem to be a mindless psychopath, he is clearly comfortable enduring and quite capable of carrying out violent acts on a scale unimaginable to any normal person. However, in the third game of the series, he seems to lose any sense of morality he may previously have possessed, working for the indisputably evil Tycho and killing BOBs on Tycho's orders in a desperate attempt to keep the Wrk'ncacnter trapped in Lh'owon's sun. In ''Infinity'', we are given greater access to his mind and feelings. He seems to recognize some sort of guilt or weariness for the atrocities he has committed, and appears to believe that he has been forced to do what he has done. Ironically, this seems accurate. All three games consist chiefly of doing what various people tell him to do - only once does he act of his own initiative, and this is in the ''Marathon'' manual, which is not an entirely reliable source.

The ship's function-control AI, Durandal, is the plot focus of all three games. Indeed, it could be argued that he, not the Cyborg, is the main character of the series. He undergoes rampancy over the course of the first game, have been purposely brought to that state by Dr. Bernhard Strauss as an attempt to achieve "stable rampancy". By the beginning of the sequel, he is meta-stable, and guides the player through the whole game. Although he is very sarcastic, with a cruel sense of humor, and seems to despise humans, he is not predominantly evil, and is never seen to abuse the cyborg or other humans without some ulterior motive. For instance, while it was in fact Durandal that secretly detected and then intentionally made the Pfhor aware of humanity's presence in order to hijack a Pfhor space-folding FTL ship -knowing full well that they would likely destroy the human colony and the Marathon, killing or enslaving every human being in the solar system before he could gain control of a Pfhor spacecraft- he considered his actions to be in humanity's long-term interest because an ambush set up by him (even with Alpha Centauri's humans as patsies) would be better than the Pfhor stumbling on humanity's home in the Sol system later on.

This is a phrase synonymous with the ''Marathon'' series. Explosive Bob "simulacrums" occasionally shout the phrase, trying to blend in with the regular BOBs and explode around a large amount of humans. Since they are only piecing together random words, their nonsense gives them away. Doug Zartman, who performed the BOB voices, was instructed during recording to improvise a random phrase, and this is what he came up with. It is very popular to say in the text chat of a network game of ''Marathon''; meant more as a joke than anything; the sheer randomness of this phrase means it can be used at any time.